Marissa Katarina Bergmann ( Aimari ) is an emerging artist, photographer, filmmaker, and vocalist based in San Francisco, CA. She graduated from Duke University, receiving a BA in Visual and Media Studies, Documentary Studies, and Photography. Marissa also studied at the Studio Art Centers International Florence once in 2009 and once again in 2010 under a Benenson Award in the Arts. Her personal and collaborative works have been featured in galleries, universities, and film festivals nationally in San Francisco, Oakland, Durham, and Chapel Hill; and internationally in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and Florence, Italy. Marissa is currently an MFA Fine Arts candidate at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA.

Marissa grew up in the California desert to a Japanese-German family, where she spent a great deal of her time with her Nisei (second generation) grandmother. Memories of the warm desert sun and time spent in her grandmother's house –a place with a golden atmosphere of repair, mending, and healing– are what fuel her work today. Marissa writes: "If the whole world were my grandmother's house, the world would be a better place, a place I am determined to create through my art."

What does Suite J-Town mean to you?
Suite J-Town is a story of resilience that spans many generations – from our ancestors, to our grandparents, parents, and our own selves, and it is a story that will continue far into the future. Suite J-Town is a special opportunity to make art for a cause, art to activate the community, art to lift the soul. In trying times, we remember how important it is to unite and stand together to make our voices heard. As a hapa mixed-race artist, I hope to be able to bring my unique voice, perspective and experience, along with a heart full of energy and enthusiasm, to this beautiful collaboration.

Portfolio:  www.aimari.com

I am a Glitter Artist creating interesting paintings that sparkle. Influenced by working in graphic design, animation, games, and film. I’ve exhibited in various galleries and art shows around the bay area. I earned a bachelors of science degree for Media Art and Animation from The Art Institute of California - San Francisco. My first solo gallery show “Sweets for the Sweet” at Trickster in Berkeley has made me a favorite returning artist. My work has been part of STUDIO Gallery SF, SF Bazaar Maker Faire, Alternative Press Expo, and Public Works. I continue to search for opportunities to share unique art with others who value true originality.

What does Suite J-Town mean to you?
Suite J-town means I have a link to my forgotten roots and a place to rediscover and explore more about my heritage. Learning a new generation of mixed culture, informed by the past.

Portfolio: www.glitterside.com

Junho Kim was born on September 28, 1988 in Tacoma, WA to Jaekyu and Younghae Kim. His parents ran several small businesses, including a clothing store, travel agency, and Korean video rental house. It was at the rental house where he made his first cut of film, repairing damaged magnetic strips of VHS tapes. One of his favorite memories from that time was when persimmons would come into a season and his mom’s shop would fill up with huge bags of them. Kim began his current trajectory of filmmaking in 2011, while a student at Duke University, where he studied with David Gatten, Steve Milligan, Josh Gibson, and Bill Brown. He has also collaborated with acclaimed filmmaker, Emiko Omori. Nowadays, he makes videos about technology, science, and design at WIRED Magazine.

What does Suite J-Town mean to me?
When I think of Suite J-Town, I think about a scene from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, where he describes a couple praying for their missing cat, Tora, at "a temple consecrated to cats."  He continues to explain how “they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.” That scene captures the essence of what Japantown means to me. It is a place that closes the vast distance between people and their history; a place to perform the old rituals and traditions, bridging the fissures left by time and space. For me, Suite J-Town is a part of those rites—an earnest series of acts to preserve the threads that connect us not only to our past, but also to one another.

Portfolio: vimeo.com/junhokim

“Neither black nor white and neither fully American nor fully Asian, my existence as a fifth generation Asian-American - Chinese-American and Japanese-American - resides in a space of liminality, neither definitely here nor there. Although this identity is powerfully fluid and intricate in its aesthetic beauty and form, my indefinite identity is invisible because it does not fit the conventional, or colonial, binaries. My art brings to light my own vibrant, beautifully-woven, collective history while also articulating the unique diversity and resiliency of the Asian-American experience. Through my pieces, I wish to make the invisible, visible.” - Eryn Kimura

What does Suite J-Town mean to me?
It's literally everything I have ever wanted to see come from this community, on a beautifully ornate gold platter. Like the west African sankofa, jtown suite is a spiritual return to our collective past while simultaneously building a more inclusive, sustainably vibrant future. Jtown suite is reclamation.

Portfolio: www.erynyk.com

Yuki is a Japanese-American artist who grew up in constant transition between her two primary cultures and languages. Her drawings are strongly influenced by the Manga (Japanese comics) she avidly read in her childhood in the US and through her adolescence in Japan. The genre is intimately connected to her dual background; Manga and related forms of popular art have played significant roles in the cultural cross-pollination between the US and Japan, especially in the last three decades.

Yuki received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from California College of the Arts in 2004. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, namely at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Southern Exposure, and the LAB in San Francisco; Flux Factory and the Queens Museum of Art in New York City; Theatres des Sens Gallery and Domestic Art Project Yomoyama-So in and near Tokyo, Japan.

What does Suite J-Town mean to you?
Japantown embodies the complex history of tension, osmosis, and coming together of Japanese and American cultures in San Francisco. Suite J-Town pays tribute its rich and legacy while reflecting upon the future of our city's cultural landscape. As an artist, and as an individual whose personal history is deeply rooted in Japan and the US, I am thankful for the opportunity to intimately explore the story of Nihonmachi and collaborate with its community.

Portfolio: yukimaruyama.wordpress.com

Elena Nielsen is a hapa-American born in Southern California and raised in the East Bay. She has been active in Japanese-American community work since childhood, participating in volunteer events like Obon and Mochitsuki at the Diablo Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Her experiences with her cultural heritage have inspired everything from her interviewing of Nisei for a history project in 8th grade, her major in Sociology at University of California Berkeley, her former position as a Publicity Officer for Cal’s Nikkei Student Union, to her recent internship in the Programs department of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC). She continues to stay connected to her culture through Taiko drumming, assisting in teaching Bon Odori dance during the summer, and article writing for Nikkei Heritage magazine, with the hopes of pursuing a career in Japanese American non-profit work in the future.

What does Suite J-Town mean to you?
Suite J-town tackles the issue of SF Japantown’s preservation by burning it down to its core elements. It takes technical terms like “cultural appropriation” and “gentrification” in the context of Japantown and humanizes them with the personal experiences, memories, and hopes of locals and J-tells alike—communicating across generational as well as ethnic and racial divides to all that relate to the issues of family, identity, and cultural longevity. As for the importance of preserving Japantown, there is something about being here that makes me instantly happy whenever I visit. We all carry our feelings of cultural pride inside ourselves individually but there is some mysterious thing about being able to travel, to pilgrimage to a place that epitomizes those feelings through its history, which allows us to bask in the parts of ourselves that do not always get to be expressed in our day-to-day routine. I hope to recreate this dual sense of both familiarity and awe for SF Japantown through the performances and events involved in the Suite J-town tour, so that visitors will also feel inspired to engage in the conversation regarding the future of our community.

After my first day of kindergarten I came home to tell my mother of my new definitive plan: “When I grow up, I want to be Japanese”. It was always a joke – what do a Cantonese-Chinese mother and an Ilocano-Filipino father do? They send their daughter to a Japanese bilingual program at the neighborhood elementary school. A 3rd-generation San Franciscan, I am a child and descendant of farmers, businessmen and women, community hosts and caretakers, laborers, cooks, (im)migrants, homemakers, midwives, and artists. I am from an urban generation that has grown up in the polycultural intersections of public schools, cross-town bus rides, chronic after school activities and vibrant summer camps.

I am new to identifying as an artist, I’ve spent most hours community organizing. I have a loose background in documentary film, installation art, performance art, experimental film, and eternal passions for singing and dancing. Lately, I’ve been into “social artistry” - facilitating group processes that focus on making the most of people’s time and talents in a socially just, participatory, and ethical way.

For me, Suite J-Town is an opportunity to:
1.  Generate a creative response to the seeming crisis of gentrification in SF and everywhere
2.  Collect stories and shape history
3.  Learn about my own community
4.  Reflect
5.  Access stranger’s emotions
6.  Face the past to better understand the complexities of displacement
7.  Celebrate resilience
8.  Transform as an artist and a person
9.  Inspire others
10.  Ask: “So what?”
11.  Create more visibility for asian-americans
12.  Radically imagine what we want

Since 2009, Ayana Yonesaka has been an active dancer and choreographer in San Francisco. She moved to the Bay Area after 12 years of training in modern dance in her hometown of Sapporo, Japan. After graduating in 2013 with a degree in dance from SFSU, she is now an instructor at the San Francisco Youth Ballet Academy and a dancer with LV Dance Collective. As a choreographer, she has presented multiple pieces that are centered around the beauty of individuals gravitating towards one another for support through hard times. She hopes to continue to create an authentic series of works revolving around this human relationship, and is excited to align her vision with Suite J-Town.

What does Suite J-Town mean to me?
My unique identity as a Hapa growing up in Sapporo is, without a doubt, the core of my artistic voice and is something I strive to cultivate as I continue to be exposed to other unique voices in San Francisco. Suite J-Town is an opportunity for me to study, connect, and magnify the voices of the Japantown community through the art of movement. I hope to capture J-Town’s untold history and unseen culture, and to uncover the soul of its people through artistic collaboration.